Accents in "ancient history" TV shows and movies

I’m watching the Discovery Channel special on Pompeii right now, and I notice they’ve given most people a vaguely British accent. Why?

Many movies or specials that are set far in the past do this as well. Troy, for example. Does accent = ancient and exotic?

I suspect it’s because there aren’t a lot of actors who speak Latin as a first language, and thus have a Latin accent.

Or perhaps because it’s assumed by somebody that Americans can’t tell the difference between foriegn accents and thus an English Accent is considered an acceptable substitute?

Or perhaps most the Actors and Extras in said production are British? I’ve got the Original London Cast of Les Miserables on CD and I do find it odd that most of the actors speak with a cockney accent when their supposed to be French.

I’ve noticed this too in movies like Troy and Gladiator. I think it is strange. Neither American English nor British English sound anything like Latin or Ancient Greek, so why not have actors speak with their natural accents.

Another example is the Dune miniseries (though it’s not set in the past). Scottish actors would speak with American or English accents.

A lot of people expressed surprise that the characters in Alexander spoke with Irish accents. There’s no reason that should be any stranger than having them speak English in any other accent; people just aren’t used to it.

Frankly, accents don’t bother me as much as people who would historically speaking another language speaking english, except when they suddenly begin speaking the real language.

I was watching **Evita ** this weekend, and it bugged me that the characters would speak English for most of the movie, except when they burst out in lines of Spanish at various points. Weren’t they speaking Spanish before, because if they were, then they’d have no reason to burst out in lines of spanish.

Or in** King Arthur**, where I assumed the characters, Romans or Roman Soldiers, were all speaking Latin, until one of the priests begin praying in Latin.

Make up your mind, pick a language and stick with it.

While not exactly ancient I did get a kick out of a British made movie/mini-series set before and during WWII in Germany. There’s something very wrong with brownshirt thugs who sound like they should be rooting for Manchester or whatever they call their soccer teams over there.

Marc

My personal theory (unresearched but I think it’s a very good theory):

Although Troy and Alexander are hardly classical theatre, in dealing with the ancient world they deal with a world that we have come to know through classical theatre.

A lot of theatrical choices simply come from tradition. For English speaking peoples classical pieces such as Antigone or Oresteia were preserved through the London Stage. Performing Classical works, often with main characters being royalty or aristocrats, the actors would speak in a formal manner, being the London stage this formal speech was a very formal British Accent.

As theatre developed in the colonies they drew upon the traditions set in London. These “British” accents used by the actors were received by audiences as simply being very “Classical”.

It’s nothing more than a convention, but it’s a convention that audiences have grown quite used to.

When a British actor performs a Classical piece and he chooses not to adopt a false accent, it seems very sensible as the piece has already been translated into English- it is unneccessary to then speak in a Greek Accent. We understand that these people are Greeks, the accent adds nothing to the storytelling. It is less cumbersome for the actor to simply use his natural manner of speach.

Conversely when an actor from Lafayette, Louisiana performs a Classical piece and he chooses not to adopt a flase accent, it is very jarring and suddenly the audience is murmurring “Why would Tiberius speak like he is from Louisiana?” Though, logically, the Louisiana actor should be able to apply the same rationale as the British actor, it is contrary to what audiences are used to.

Added to this, the accent actors use in Classical pieces, really is its own unique accent used as a stylistic choice. Though to American ears it sounds more British than American, if you were to walk around England speaking that way you’d probably provoke some very odd reactions.

I was just about to make the same point bienville made - it’s a cultural/historical thing. We automatically associate “English Theatrical Pronunciation” with “Classical” simply because we always have. A lot of it is probably Shakespeare’s fault - our cultural image of, say, Julius Caesar comes from his plays, and just like every Shakespeare character, he is assumed to speak with a British accent. And if Caesar speaks that way, shouldn’t all Romans?

Additionally, we can’t associate “American” with “Ancient”. The U.S. hasn’t been around for that long, so when we hear an American accent, we automatically think in terms of the last two centuries. To us, American speech is inherently modern. England, OTOH, has been around forever (or close enough), so British accents don’t bear that specific connotation.

I think I ought to point out that many British actors are, indeed, adopting a “false” accent. It would be just as jarring to British audiences (by and large, exceptions notwithstanding, no purchase necessary) if Tiberius were from Sunderland or Bradford.

Not related to acting per se, but similar nonetheless: Anglo announcers on NPR who pronounce Spanish place names with a Spanish accent, but not other foreign place names in their respective accents. Why “Nee-cah-lah-GOO-wah”? but not “PAHR-ee”? Strangely, they only seem to do this with palce names in North and South America; if it’s in Spain, the place name is pronounced with a typical Midland Northern accent.

I’ve seen a lot of American productions of Shakespeare plays in the last thirty or so years, and most of them use American accents, not British, unless they are doing the English histories.

In Spartacus Stanley Kubrick reportedly made a conscious effort to give his Romans British Accents and his slaves American accents (except for Lavinia, who was supposed to be “cultured”, as she was a tutor). It seems to work pretty well, and gives a definite feel of difference in status (although John Gavin’s Julius Caesar doesn’t really have a British accent). It might just have been a way of justifying Tony Curtis’ Brooklyn accent, for all I know.

They seemed to do something similar with the TV movie Masada, in which the Romans have British accents (with the common soldiers having Cockney accents, no less), and the Jewish characters have American accents. Although, again, it might just be the way the casting worked out.

I note that in last night’s ** Pompeii** one of the slaves had a sort of Italian accent. Maybe this was supposed to indicate a foreign birth (pretty ironic, with Pompeii being in Italy).

I was having a discussion with a friend about a script he was writing. The story was set in the PNW before Europeans contacted the aboriginal people. How would the dialog be handled?

I said they should speak regular English. For one thing, American audiences tend not to like reading subtitles. For another thing, how many of the actors would be able to speak the aboriginal tongue?

He said it would sound funny if the actors spoke colloquial English, and that they wouldn’t have known some phrases. ‘So what?’, I asked. ‘If they speak some form of stylised English it will sound stilted. To their ears, their conversations would sound just as normal as we sound to each other when we talk.’ For example in Rapa Nui the Chief says, ‘There’s blood when I pee.’ I don’t think ‘pee’ is a word they would have used on the island, but whatever the aboriginals would have said would have translated that way colloquially.

If I’m watching a German film, I expect the dialog to be in German. If it is in English, then the actors should not put on an accent. Same with French or Italian. In The Hunt For Red October the Russians spoke Russian at first, and then seques into English. They generally did not put on a Russian accent. (Although Sean Connery used one when he spoke with the Americans. In this case he was speaking English in the context of the scene – i.e., a Russian speaking English to Americans – and so would have had an accent.)

CalMeachum is right about the accents in Spartacus - upper class British for the upper class Romans (for the most part), American English for the peons. If you saw the movie you might have noticed that ordinary Romans, such as the soldiers, either had American or indeterminate accents.

Julius Caesar, while of noble birth, was a populist, and associated with advancing the cause of the common people. While it might be a stretch, it is conceivable that Kubrick wanted him to have an American, if educated accent, to show that.

There is absolutely no excuse for the Tony Curtis accent - an educated Greek, even if a slave, would have sounded educated to the Romans. I am old enough to remember the reviews when it came out, and Tony Curtis got a lot of grief for the way he spoke.

One simple reason might be simply that the show was produced in England, and the actors weren’t “putting on an accent”, they were just speaking their normal English English. And thus to the show’s expected audience over there, they were speaking normally. I missed this one, but most of the Discovery Channel historial recreation shows seem to be British productions.

Me and the girlfriend did seem a bit amused at this, we were wondering if it was some sort of piss take :dubious:

The other night I was at a dinner theater event produced by the historic reenactment club at my sister’s college. The performance was set in Renaissance Italy…so of course everyone had to speak with a fake, modern English accent!

Do you mean all the characters had Irish accents, or just the ones played by Irish actors?

Ah, maybe that’s it, then. Because I notice this a lot on the Discovery Channel. Anything about ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, and the actors sound like they should be reporting news on the BBC. Now that I think of it, a lot of the science specials are promoted as **a BBC/Discovery production ** or something like that. Maybe it’s the same for the horrible historical re-enactments.

A similar pet peeve of mine is British and Irish announcers always referring to the Spanish city/football team Valencia as “Valenthia”, when they never make any effort to pronounce any other name, Spanish or otherwise, the way the natives would pronounce it. (And besides, it should be pronounced “Balenthia” anyway.)

I didn’t see the film, but I got the impression from the comments about it that they were all speaking with Irish accents.